A Goldwater of the Left

As the Arizona Senator paved the way for a conservative GOP, George McGovern presaged liberals' cultural dominance.

Early in Ronald Reagan’s second term, Bill Rusher, the publisher of National Review, was interviewing the president in the Oval Office for a documentary on the conservative movement.

Rusher asked how he would describe Barry Goldwater’s role.

Reagan thought a moment and replied: I guess you would have to call him the John the Baptist of our movement.

I resisted the impulse to lean in and ask, “Sir, if Barry Goldwater was John the Baptist, who would that make you?”

The death of George McGovern brought back thoughts of these two men who suffered two of the greatest defeats in presidential history.

McGovern was an unapologetic liberal from South Dakota. Goldwater was Mr. Conservative and proud of it. Both had been World War II pilots. Goldwater had flown “over the hump,” the Himalayas, into China. George McGovern flew bombing runs over the Ploesti oil fields.

McGovern had been at the Progressive Party convention in 1948 that nominated Henry Wallace to run against Harry Truman. Goldwater voted against the Senate censure of Joe McCarthy in 1954 and was one of only six Republicans to oppose the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

In 1964, Goldwater led his party to a 22-point defeat at the hands of Lyndon Johnson, winning only five states of the Deep South and Arizona.

Eight years later, McGovern lost every state but Massachusetts to Richard Nixon in the worst rout ever sustained by a nominee of his party. In 1984, McGovern would be joined in that dubious distinction of a 49-state defeat by Walter Mondale.

Yet unlike others who have lost presidential bids in modern times–Mondale, Michael Dukakis, Bob Dole, Al Gore, John Kerry, John McCain–Goldwater and McGovern proved to be men ahead of their time.

Though a reluctant candidate who had to be “drafted,” Goldwater became the political instrument of a rising conservative movement that used his campaign to tear the Republican Party away from an Eastern liberal establishment that had controlled it for generations and dictated its nominees.

In 1960, Vice President Nixon had traveled to New York to cut a deal with and mollify Nelson Rockefeller. But by 1968, it was the endorsement of Goldwater and conservatives like John Tower of Texas and Strom Thurmond of South Carolina that were Nixon’s keys to the nomination. After 1964, the liberal establishment never again imposed a nominee on the GOP.

But between the movement that captured the nomination for Goldwater and the cause that captured the Democratic Party for McGovern, there were differences not only of philosophy.

The Goldwater people were rebels. They wanted to overthrow and displace the old leadership. Many McGovernites were revolutionaries.

Where conservatives sought a party more true to its principles, many McGovernites wanted to change America into another country–more statist, egalitarian, permissive. They did not like the country they grew up in. The Goldwaterites wished to restore the best of those times.

“Why Not Victory” was the title of Goldwater’s book on the Cold War. “Come Home, America” was McGovern’s slogan.

Where McGovern sought to end the war in Vietnam, some of his supporters thought America was on the wrong side of that war and on the wrong side of the Cold War. They marched under Viet Cong flags, chanting: “Ho! Ho! Ho! Chi Minh–The NLF is going to win.”

With McGovern’s nomination, conservatives in the Democratic Party who had voted for George Wallace or Hubert Humphrey in 1968 moved in the millions into Nixon’s New Majority and would remain there until the end of the Cold War. They became the Reagan Democrats.

Whatever McGovern’s personal views, his campaign became the vehicle of the counterculture of the 1960s, of the feminist and homosexual rights movements, of antiwar activists and student radicals, of Harvard and the Hollyleft, all of whom were in those years cordially detested by Middle America.

Goldwater’s nomination ripped the Republican Party asunder. But Nixon, the most skillful politician of his generation, was able to stitch it back together by 1968 to win the presidency.

McGovern’s nomination run replicated Goldwater’s. His people had written the rules for the 1972 delegate selection process and written the bosses out. The nomination would be decided in state conventions, caucuses and primaries, as it was in the Goldwater campaign.

The Goldwater nomination left conservatives in the GOP with the power to nominate one of their own every four years, or to veto any non-conservative. No Republican ticket after Goldwater would be without a conservative. In 1976, the right would force Gerald Ford to dump his vice president, Nelson Rockefeller, as the price of its support.

McGovern’s followers never captured the presidency, as the right did with Reagan. But the counterculture for which his campaign was the earliest political expression became the dominant culture of America’s social, cultural and intellectual elite. We live with the consequences still.

And only that altered culture could have opened the door of the presidency to a man of Bill Clinton or Barack Obama’s background.

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11 Responses to A Goldwater of the Left

Barack Obama is to the Democrats what Reagan was to the GOP — that’s a nice and original analogy. Recall that Reagan lost the House in his first midterm election, 1982. But with the benefit of hindsight, we can now say that Bill Clinton, after he lost Congress in 1994, proved a fairly harmless President. Furthermore, he cooperated with the GOP to balance the budget every year of his second term. Clinton was more of a Democratic version of Nixon.

Obama will be reelected, though not by a landslide. The House will remain GOP. I decline to call the Senate, but will say that some GOP Senate candidates lack verbal adroitness in the public arena. At any rate, the next Congress will have an effective veto over much of what Obama would prefer to do. Congress and the President will prove unable to agree on how to modify ObamaCare. The President will also veto any outright repeal. The destruction of American health will proceed, unhindered until 2017.

If Nixon was “the most skillful politician of his generation”, why did he lose in 1960, 1962 in his run for California Govenor, and so bungled Watergate that he had to resign.
“The Goldwater nomination left conservatives in the GOP with the power to nominate one of their own every four years, or to veto any non-conservative.” Not true Nixon was not a conservative as he declared, “we are all Keynesians now”, instituted wage and price controls, and took America off the gold
standard. Neither was George H.W. Bush a conservative, nor his son, No Child
Left Behind, Prescription Drug Benefit.
I do somewhat agree that the left has temporarily won the economic battle
except with respect to taxes. The top tax rate was 70% when Mcgovern ran.
With respect to spending owing to the large deficits that will gradually change. Federal Government spending will be cut as state and local spending has already been and will continue to be cut.
As far as the cultural battle it benefits the Democrats to have large numbers
of out of wedlock births because single women, especially those with children
are much more likely to be on welfare and therefore much more likely to vote Democrat. But as welfare spending is cut and the country becomes more fiscally conservative I believe there will be a significant reduction in out of wedlock births. The latest study I saw said that teenagers are less sexually active than in the past. As far as abortion, with the aging of the baby boomers there has been a modest but significant shift away from support for abortion.

Pat, I would argue that the GOP has indeed nominated Republican Liberals since Goldwater. Namely, McCain in 2008 and Romney in 2012. They are both liberal Republicans in every sense of the word. They both advocate government centered solution to the economy, and both advocate a decidedly Wilsonian foreign policy based on supporting the “Democracy Revolution” and global social engineering. None of these are “conservative” policies or points. As such more than anything we are witnessing the merger of the two major parties into what could be called the party of Right-wing Statism (Republican) and the Party of Left-wing Statism (Democrat). I doubt neither Goldwater, Raegan, nor McGovern would look fondly on this development.

If you stand back and look at the last 100 years the Progressive(socialist)agenda has marched America forward to the point of bankruptcy. All the Leftist agendas and world views since Wilson are now the law of the land. With that said,there is no doubt that in the last 50 years Richard Nixon stands out as one of the most liberal Presidents of the second half of the 20th Century. Roe vs.Wade,going off the gold exchange system,the closest that the Equal Rights Amendment came to passing,recognizing Red China,ending the Draft,ending the Vietnam War,following up on Civil Rights,wage and price controls,the founding of the EPA,the continuing expansion of the Welfare State plus other items that are all part and parcel of the liberal agenda of the 1960s. The truth is that Nixon furthered the liberal agenda. In addition to Nixon,Bill Clinton,especially in his second term was more of a Republican moderate,if not conservative,then the Democrats that proceeded him. Its as if the whole world was turned upside down. In the end its the Elitists and the Statists that have won out.

jerry, the United States was BORN deep in bankruptcy, defaulting on our allies, and neglecting to even pay the veterans who won our independence a fraction of what they had been promised. Nothing new there.

The author of this column seems wedded to a Manichean world view (and also nostalgiac for his services in the Nixon administration). In fact, Nixon would likely have lost again in 1968, if Robert Kennedy had not been assassinated. History is that capricious, and more so.

Having knocked on doors for McGovern in Middle America (Wisconsin and Ohio, to be precise), I acquired a very different view of how he lost than the media pundits, right, left or center, mournfully constructed.

McGovern had plenty of blue collar support in the primaries. Manufacturing workers in Massachusetts, paper mill workers in the Fox River Valley, among others, were the ones who put him over the top to the nomination. Beautiful People in California might have held fundraisers, but there weren’t enough of them to win an election, not even in California.

But he made the same mistake after winning the nomination that Barack Obama made after winning a general election. He accepted advice that the Great Middle wanted him to tone it down, wanted him to make it up with the Powers That Be. He tried, and that was his undoing. That’s why people in such well known bastions of liberalism as Xenia and Fairborn told me “I can’t vote for him any more. He turned out to be another politician like all the rest.’

People vote for much more complex reasons than politicians and pundits give us credit for. In 2004, six percent of the Wisconsin electorate split their vote between George W. Bush and Russ Feingold. Pundits speculate, how could Scott Walker be elected in a state won handily by Barack Obama? Then they ask how Obama can be competitive in a state where Walker just handily defeated a recall campaign? Ask the voters who really decide elections, who vote for their own ornery reasons, not because some media pundit has assigned them a pigeon hole.

(My take on Walker? Both times he was running against Tom Barrett. That explains the people’s choice, right there. It comes down to a choice between this candidate or that candidate, not an up or down vote on one individual.)

“Recall that Reagan lost the House in his first midterm election, 1982. ”

How could Reagan lose the House in 1982 since he never had to begin with? The historical significance of Gingrich’s capture of the House in 1994 was that it was the first time since 1954 that the Republicans controlled the House of Represenatives, a very long dry spell.

libertarian jerry, I wholeheartedly agree with your evaluation of Richard Nixon, although I wouldn’t blame the Supreme Court’s Roe v. Wade decision on him. I would add affirmative action to your indictment. While I admire Pat’s loyalty to his former boss, I am bemused by his total defense of the man and his policies, which, as you point out, can hardly be deemed “conservative.”

Nixon was first and foremost a political opportunist. As a navy veteran after WW II, applying to be the Republican challenger to Jerry Voorhis, he presented himself as a conservative. Running for election, it paid to use the language of early cold war anticommunism. In later years, Nixon candidly admitted, he knew Voorhis, and Helen Gahagan Douglas, were not communists, but his job was to win.

He launched the Southern Strategy, not because he believed deeply in Jim Crow, but because a block of electoral votes was available. That was roughly true of Goldwater too, who certainly ran his family business without a trace of racism, but if anything Goldwater was pandering a bit more, as landmark civil rights legislation was just pending at the time. Nixon was the man who proved wrong the black militant statement that a President might say “We shall overcome” (as LBJ did) but none would ever say “Black power.” It’s an elastic concept, and Nixon called for it, on prime time TV.

Sponsoring OSHA and EPA was the standard political strategy of stealing your opponents’ best issues. I can testify from personal experience, having field and pursued a complaint with OSHA, that it is a toothless paper tiger. It carefully scrutinized the content of the white-out used in my employer’s offices, but did nothing about real hazards to spinal injury to employees on the road.

And what ultimately brought Nixon down was not being bad on this or that issue… but the methods he was willing to use to insure he stayed in power, the real issue at all times. That’s really what the 1972 election was all about, too.

tbraton – the Republicans did not have the U.S. House to lose in 1982, but Ronald Reagan did. Recall that he had a working majority of Republicans and conservative Democrats to pass significant legislation and send it to a newly Republican Senate – including the Kemp-Roth tax cuts spearheaded by then Democratic Congressman Phil Gramm.

Siarlys, Richard Nixon may have fashioned a Southern Strategy in 1968 by winning the endorsement of Strom Thurmond (thereby quelling the Ronald Reagan insurgency) and campaigning on the theme of “law and order”, which many took to mean a hard response to urban riots, but he did not campaign to repeal civil rights laws (and, of course, moved to expand them). Barry Goldwater did not vote against the Civil Rights Act of 1964 to advance his presidential aspirations – quite the contrary. That vote may have won him a few Southern states that had never voted Republican since Reconstruction, but it lost him the rest of the nation, and that was known at the time. Goldwater voted against the 1964 Act for the same reason Ron and Rand Paul have both stated their objections – it’s an unconstitutional piece of mischief passed by Congress under a Commerce Clause its framers never intended to be used to tell private businessmen with whom they must do business, and has been used since its inception less to bring an end to actual attempts to exclude black customers, vendors and workers from the marketplace than it has to establish systems of racial, gender and other quotas.

William, you are entirely correct about Nixon’s southern strategy. Like I said, he took a political opportunity, not a stand on principle.

Goldwater was not running to be a martyr. He intended to win. He expected to keep more traditionally Republican territory than he did. He may have underestimated what the Civil Rights laws meant to American voters of African descent — not a few of whom retained Republican sympathies. In 1956, Thurgood Marshall told the Pittsburgh Courier he forsaw a massive shift of black votes back to the Republican Party. I’ve read a good deal of archived private correspondence about this from black clergy, journalists, and others.

Starting from a neutral plane, I might agree on principle with your critique of the Civil Rights laws. But, the USA in general, and the state which were most influenced by confederate ideology in particular, had a long history of imposing racial discrimination by law, as well as custom. So it was not out of order to reverse the process and put the weight of law behind breaking this down.

As far as public accommodations go, it has been embedded in Anglo-Saxon common law, and many other legal traditions, that such businesses must serve all who “travel the road.” It DID in fact bring to an end widespread exclusion of black customers, vendors and workers. What it may have been used for since is a legitimate, but separate, question.

Although McGovern lost badly in 1972, his young supporters then have the power now. They have won the culture especially in a social sense. On social issues, Goldwater wasn’t a conservative but a libertarian.